Recently there have been a few great and green projects that have caught my eye and feel the need to share these innovations with all of you… The Clever Little Bag by Puma Recently Puma announced the Clever Little Bag that will reduce their environmental footprint. As a shoelover, a shoebox is...
A retailer’s primary role may be that of curator and tastemaker, but that doesn’t mean that the crowds can’t pitch in to help. Modcloth is a Pittsburgh-based online retailer that sells affordable, independent designer women’s fashion. With a recently launched initiative called...
There’s a growing dining trend in several North American cities that has been gaining a lot of momentum. Instead of trying to just bring new customers to their restaurants, innovative thinking restaurateurs are also bringing their restaurants to new customers. Catering trucks and street food...
Cubis is an innovative packaging concept design that is a stackable, flip-top plastic beverage container, usable with one hand, even by a toddler. Because of its cube shape, the Cubis increases shelf value by allowing far more product to be displayed in the same space. The high volume efficiency of...
Spent a few hours in Nanjing Lu, the main shopping street in Shanghai with lots of shopping malls, department stores and restaurants… in a nutshell: everything the Chinese and tourists want in one street. I first visited this street 25 years ago and it was very different. Today’s Shanghai is...
In our current economic climate, large home renovation projects are fewer in number. Despite a lack of new building projects, the desire to tinker with the look of our living rooms hasn’t gone away – we just need to be smarter about design. Small changes in furniture, fabric and paint can...
Every one loves the sexy side of design and that is probably the most visible part of the profession. Many neglect the less sexy side of design: the solving of very complex problems in the world. Designers are strategists too, although sometimes they don’t know it. In the course of finding solutions,...
Packaging, contests, games, recipes, online portals, prizes and product information make CPGs more fun than fresh. Able to transform assembled ingredients into brand experiences, they’re often used as tricky tools to distract consumers from the fact that what’s inside the box is anything but fresh...
I was recently trying to do some research on headphones. There are hundreds of models out there and I quickly found that most companies do a very poor job differentiating one of their models from the next, much less differentiating their products from their competitors’. I was particularly frustrated...
Service design is an innovative and emerging discipline. I am not referring to the older definition of it in the manufacturing and hospitality industries. Today, almost every business is a service business. How service companies bring innovation to life largely depends on how they define themselves....
…most companies do a very poor job differentiating one of their models from the next, much less differentiating their products from their competitors’.